from the killswitch dept

The latest Techdirt podcast is a bit different from our usual fare. This was actually a panel discussion, held back in December at the offices of BitTorrent, right before they did a showing of Killswitch, a new documentary about the battle to control the internet. The panel discussion was wide-ranging, touching on issues from net neutrality to cybersecurity to surveillance, copyright, patents and more. I moderated the panel, which consisted of Evan Engstrom from Engine, Rainey Reitman from EFF, Eric Klinker from BitTorrent and Ali Akbarzadeh, the director of Killswitch. It was a good discussion about the various threats that are facing the internet today, and what's being done about them.

from the just-like-hollywood-takes-responsibility-for-its-movies? dept

You would think that a Hollywood astroturfing group, funded by all of the major Hollywood studios, would know better than to issue a blatant attack on another company for "failing to condemn" how some people viewed their products. After all, Hollywood is the industry that glorifies murder, con men and (yes) piracy. And Hollywood gets quite up in arms any time anyone suggests that its movies might influence folks in that way. That's the correct response because it is silly and ridiculous to attack an industry that makes one thing for then not condemning how that thing may be viewed or used improperly. But, apparently, some folks in Hollywood have no problem casting similar aspersions on industries they hate.

Earlier this year, we wrote about the "launch" of a new Hollywood-funded organization called "CreativeFuture." As we noted, this "launch" was a bit misleading, because CreativeFuture was just the rebranding of Creative America, an organization that Hollywood slapped together as an astroturfing group in support of SOPA and PIPA. It pretends to represent the interests of creators, but actually is almost entirely funded by the major Hollywood studios. After Creative America was a complete disaster, widely derided (even inside Hollywood) as a joke, Hollywood did a rebrand to CreativeFuture, and brought in new leadership in the form of Ruth Vitale, whom the NY Times described as "sassy." Except, as we noted, the playbook remained the same: basically misrepresent issues related to copyright, pretend to represent "artists" when actually representing the big studios who regularly screw over artists, and always, always, always blame the innovators and technology companies who have provided new tools and services that have helped reinvent the industry for decades.

Vitale is bringing her "sassy" take to this playbook with a bizarre attack on BitTorrent, entitled: We're All Waiting, BitTorrent. The basic argument is that since BitTorrent is often used for exchanging unauthorized copies of content BitTorrent Inc. has a responsibility to (1) "condemn" how its own technology is used and (2) figure out a way to stop it from being used that way.

If BitTorrent wished to prevent their client applications from being used to facilitate massive piracy, it could do something about it. The company says it’s all about technology, so how about using technology to reduce piracy?

Funny how some technology companies like BitTorrent are always extolling the unlimited power of technology – except when it can be used to help creators by preventing the unauthorized distribution of their creative content.

I believe that BitTorrent’s failure to publicly condemn the misuse of its protocol – and to actually do something about it – is going to hurt the company’s efforts to build legitimate business models... just like it hurts everyone else’s.

Despite the fact that, for many years, Hollywood has been blamed for all sorts of stuff concerning its movies -- and Hollywood has, rightly, pointed out that it's ridiculous to blame its movies for idiots imitating what's in the movies, or for believing they're anything more than fictional stories. And yet, now, when it comes to technology, Hollywood wants to take the same bogus moral panics used against it and turn it on technology? Just how cynical can Hollywood get?

Oh, actually much more cynical. Vitale also pulls out a sarcastic "manifesto" that BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen wrote many years before working on BitTorrent, in which he jokingly talked about building tools to "commit digital piracy" as if she's found the smoking gun.

The whole point of this "sassy" rant appears to be to drive creators away from embracing new technologies. She directly says that creators should "pause" before working with BitTorrent Inc., because even though it's created a massive tool for free distribution, combined with a very committed and loyal audience, which many creators have found help drive sales, she doesn't like that they haven't "done enough" to "stop piracy."

This is the same misguided playbook that Jack Valenti played for years, attacking the very technology his industry needed to embrace, delaying the inevitable and harming the very industry he "represented." Because, really, what does Vitale think will happen if either of her demands are met? If BitTorrent could magically make its protocol less useful, people will immediately switch to something else. If BitTorrent were to vocally "condemn" uses of its technology for infringement, does she honestly think that people who use BitTorrent to infringe on copyrights will magically change their ways? Who is she fooling, other than herself?

Instead of recognizing that there are many big entertainment fans that the industry could embrace and drive towards additional offerings, Vitale wants to make this a silly moral stand that will do no good -- not unlike the silly "morality" attacks on Hollywood for "promoting" sex and violence. Why Vitale would take such a page from the very people who tend to attack her industry is beyond me. It's hardly a strategy for embracing the future, and seems like one that only cements legacy Hollywood's image of being clueless and out of touch with today's entertainment fans, as well as new and innovative technologies.

from the change-things-around dept

If you've been following the whole net neutrality fight for a while, the following graphic may be familiar to you -- showing what a potential "cable-ized" world the internet would become without strong protections for net neutrality:

At some point, someone created a similar version, that was specific to AT&T:

A little while ago, however, someone took the joke even further, and set up a website for a fake broadband provider, asking people to Join the Fastlane!, and it was pretty dead on in terms of what such a site might look like:

I particularly like this bit:

It's now come out that this campaign (along with some associated billboards) has been put together by BitTorrent Inc., not all that different than the company's billboard campaign against the NSA. Along with this, BitTorrent has put out a blog post explaining, in part, how we got here, but more importantly how we need to start thinking about a better way to handle internet traffic to avoid the kind of future described above.

The key issue: building a more decentralized internet:

Many smart researchers are already thinking about this problem. Broadly speaking, this re-imagined Internet is often called Content Centric Networking. The closest working example we have to a Content Centric Network today is BitTorrent. What if heavy bandwidth users, say, Netflix, for example, worked more like BitTorrent?

If they did, each stream — each piece of content — would have a unique address, and would be streamed peer-to-peer. That means that Netflix traffic would no longer be coming from one or two places that are easy to block. Instead, it would be coming from everywhere, all at once; from addresses that were not easily identified as Netflix addresses — from addresses all across the Internet.

To the ISP, they are simply zeroes and ones.

All equal.

There's obviously a lot more to this, but it's good to see more and more people realizing that one of the fundamental problems that got us here is the fact that so much of the internet has become centralized -- and, as such, can be easily targeted for discrimination. Making the internet much more decentralized is a big step in making it so that discrimination and breaking net neutrality aren't even on the table.

from the good-for-them dept

From pretty much the beginning of this blog, we've been talking about how artists who embrace what new technologies allow seem to see much better results than trying to resist the future. Last year, we discussed examples of how both Moby and Tim Ferriss were embracing BitTorrent and its "bundles" offering to amazing results. BitTorrent has now published some data on the amazing ability of a variety of artists to use BitTorrent Bundles to drive tremendous attention and revenue their way.

Moby, for example, got an astounding 8.9 million downloads of his offering -- with 419,000 of them agreeing to join his mailing list and 130,000 of them going over to iTunes to the album (many of which likely resulted in sales). And, of course, the thing Moby himself said he was most excited about was the ability of fans to remix and reimagine his works. So it's another bit of good news to see that 68,000 remixes were created. As for Ferriss, his bundle of additional material that went with his book turned into an amazing promotion. His book was published by Amazon, but banned by Barnes and Noble (because, apparently, Barnes and Noble is petty). The material got 2 million downloads, leading an astounding 880,000 of those people to go check out the book on Amazon... where the book became a best seller.

The link above provides a number of other case studies about ways in which a variety of artists are learning to use BitTorrent and BitTorrent Bundles to help gain widespread attention, and then are able to turn that attention into fans and revenue. And this is a program that only recently started, so we're excited to see where it continues to go in the future.

from the what-year-is-this? dept

I had thought that we'd gotten past the point at which Hollywood execs would freak out over the use of a modern, better, more efficient technology to help promote a movie, but apparently in the minds of some of the folks who run the big movie studios, we're perpetually stuck in 2004 or so. That's the only explanation I can figure out for this wacky article from TheWrap, which highlights what appears to be a single (completely anonymous, of course) Hollywood studio big shot absolutely losing his mind over the fact that a major movie is promoting itself by distributing the first 7 minutes for free via BitTorrent, in a marketing deal done with BitTorrent Inc. Indie studio Cinedgim made the deal with BitTorrent to promote their new film Arthur Newman, starring Colin Firth and Emily Blunt, and it seems like a perfectly normal way to promote stuff, but not to one studio exec who can't even bother to stand behind his words by identifying himself.

"It's a deal with the devil," one studio executive told TheWrap. "Cinedigm is being used as their pawn."

A deal with the devil? Funny, I remember most of the major studios doing deals with BitTorrent Inc. six years ago. That was for a poorly planned out and poorly executed video download store, but still. Most people now recognize that there are all sorts of opportunities in going where your customers and fans are. That a Hollywood exec doesn't see that is a bit scary for whichever studio they happen to work for.

"It's great for BitTorrent and disingenuous of Cinedigm," said the executive. "The fact of the matter is BitTorrent is in it for themselves, they're not in it for the health of the industry."

Now that's just funny. As if the studio execs are not in it for themselves? The studios have focused on a business model that sucks the life out of the "health of the industry" for ages, by trying to squeeze out as much money as possible from just a few ideas -- doing remakes and sequels and adaptations, rather than doing anything that is new or unique. And then they use Hollywood accounting to make sure the actual creators almost never get paid any additional money, while they make many times over the amount invested. A statement like that pretends that the exec has the "health of the industry" in mind, rather than his own bottom line.

And, of course, there's a strong argument that this statement is totally wrong as well. Cinedigm really does appear to have a much bigger focus on the health of the industry than this nameless studio exec, because Cinedigm is trying to adapt with the times and to embrace new opportunities.

"I really missed them being at the forefront of the piracy issue," the studio executive said. "I don't remember them going, 'Naughty, naughty, don't use our technology for that.' They don't give a shit."

Huh? Actually, from rather early on, BitTorrent made clear that you shouldn't use their technology to infringe, because BitTorrent does nothing to hide your IP address. When it first came out, in fact, most people talked about how it wasn't a great technology for infringement, given the lack of secrecy involved in using it. Furthermore, from as far back as I can remember, BitTorrent the company (which this exec seems to confuse entirely with BitTorrent the protocol) has worked hard to promote legitimate and non-infringing uses. We already talked about the (failed) partnerships with Hollywood in the past, but the company has long been focused on helping to try to find ways to drag Hollywood execs into the 21st century with a better, more efficient platform for distribution.

Really, this exec just seems to be acting in a knee jerk way against BitTorrent the company without understanding very much at all. Hell, even the idea of releasing the first seven minutes of a movie online for free to drive more views -- that's been done for years. There's almost nothing new here at all. In fact, we wrote about a movie studio doing the exact same thingthirteen years ago when Dreamworks did that with Chicken Run. How could it possibly be a bad thing to release the first 7 minutes of a movie for free, in an effort to convince people that it will be worth their while to go see the full thing? Well, I can think of one way: if you make crap movies where the first seven minutes will convince you not to pay to see the rest. Perhaps that's this exec's problem.

Thankfully, the forward-looking folks at Cinedigm don't seem put off by one anonymous exec at a competing studio:

"Blaming BitTorrent for piracy is like blaming a freeway for drunk drivers, " Jill Calcaterra, Cinedigm's chief marketing officer said. "How people use it can be positive for the industry or it can hurt the industry. We want it help us make this indie film successful."

Furthermore, it appears that they're planning to use BitTorrent to promote a number of other films this way as well.

from the how-it-all-works dept

Last August, we wrote about an experiment by famous skateboarder and filmmaker Stacy Peralta to self-distribute his latest film, Bones Brigade, about the famous skateboarding crew Peralta himself had put together a few decades ago (the crew included some of the most famous skateboarders ever: Tony Hawk, Lance Mountain, Steve Caballero, Mike McGill and Tommy Guerrero). Peralta had shown the film at Sundance last year, which is where most filmmakers go to try to "sell" their film to a studio/distributor to go make something of it. However, Peralta turned down all such offers (some for significant money), and instead went the "direct to fan" self-distribution path, using tools like TopSpin, and partnering with companies like BitTorrent as well. That's what we wrote about in August.

Now, as the latest Sundance is underway, TopSpin's Bob Moczydlowsky has a post with some details of how it all went, noting that going direct to fan was massively successful for Peralta, allowing him to both make more money and still retain the rights to the film, rather than selling them off to some other entity.

And now, a year after the Sundance premiere and six months from the start of the direct-to-fan release powered by Topspin, Film Sales Company and our partners awe.sm and The Uprising Creative, Stacy has earned more from direct sales than he would have from the combined total of the domestic and foreign sales offers. And, because a Topspin direct release does not require licensing rights, Stacy and Andrew Herwitz from Film Sales Company were then able to do their own Transactional VOD and Third-party license deals. Stacy and his financing partners quickly recouped the budget of the film, and the copyright remains in their hands for the future.

That really is the key. “I self financed, got the investment back, am now in profit and I own the copyright and will continue to earn all other sales for the next ten years,” says Stacy. “And it is all because I was empowered for the very first time to really do it myself from start to finish. Topspin has done for distribution what the Handycam did for shooting or the Avid did for editing. Topspin put it all in my hands and suddenly everything I needed was within my reach: pure and simple filmmakers democracy.”

They also included a nice little pie chart (to scale), showing how much bigger the pie was with what Peralta ended up doing:

This is not to say, of course, that the same thing is true for everyone who tries to go direct to fan. It's right for some people, and not right for others. But the key thing here is that there are more options and many of those options not only leave the actual creators with more control, but also allow them to expand the pie.

One of the more frustrating aspects of discussing these business model issues with some people is their assumption that the "pie" is static (or, worse, shrinking). It's a classic mistake in economics for those who think that everything is a zero sum game. But one of the great things about new technologies and services is how they enable a much broader audience and increase the opportunities, opening up wider possibilities -- especially for creators who really know how to engage with their fans.

from the too-legit-to-quit dept

When the VCR first came on the market, nearly 100% of the TV and movie content it was used for was "unauthorized," because the big studios refused to offer films. Of course, thankfully, the Supreme Court eventually made it clear that just because it was "unauthorized," it didn't mean that taping TV for later watching was "infringing." But, if the metric you used to judge whether or not a new technology is a "pirate technology" is what percentage of its use was "unauthorized," you get a very skewed picture. Early on, all sorts of new and innovative technologies are mostly used for unauthorized copies... until the industry catches up. However, people don't often deal with trends very well, and they assume, quite incorrectly, that if a technology is initially used in an unauthorized manner, it must be a "piracy tool" and no amount of discussing how trends and adaptation works will convince them otherwise. Lately, there has been plenty of talk about BitTorrent -- with a few cases here and there pointing out that a high percentage (usually over 90% of works are infringing). The argument being made is that there is little redeeming value with BitTorrent since it's almost exclusively used for infringement.

Of course, over time, things change. Content creators begin to embrace the new, realize that it might not be evil, and suddenly we see more and more interesting case studies. And that seems to be happening with BitTorrent. The recent MusicMetric analysis of BitTorrent downloads for the first six months of 2012 found that 31% of downloads were for authorized files. Now, you can argue that this is still less than half of all files -- but it's a big step up from the standard claims that somewhere between 1% and 10% were authorized. It seems quite likely that the trend is moving in the right direction.

In an effort to highlight just how much authorized content is shared using BitTorrent, Bittorrent Inc. put together a neat graphic representation of just one day's authorized downloads, creating a massive page that includes a single dot for every authorized download. We've put a snapshot of just a small portion of that image below this post... but that's really only a fragment. If you go to the full page, there's an awful lot of scrolling involved. And that's because it's showing 689,955 authorized downloads. In a single day. Not bad.

In case you're wondering who's actually offering up music that's getting downloaded like this, Eliot van Buskirk tracked down the top ten authorized music acts on BitTorrent, which turns up a few surprises.

Death Grips: 34,151,432

Counting Crows: 26,950,427

Billy Van: 18,702,053

Gods Robot: 12,172,672

Way Too Sick: 9,974,321

Paz: 6,485,001

Bray: 5,878,492

Pretty Lights: 5,005,061

DJ Shadow: 4,349,048

Chester French: 523,356

As Eliot notes, that number one legal download, Death Grips, is signed to a major label deal on Epic (part of Sony Music). The Counting Crows are obviously a big name as well, and we wrote about their decision to use BitTorrent. They're ex-big label, but now independent. Also, DJ Shadow and Chester French were both associated with Universal sub-labels, though I do not know if either are still "signed." Either way, it's interesting to see that it's a mix of artists, including some from major labels and some others. It certainly looks like, perhaps, the idea that BitTorrent is just for infringement may have to be officially considered debunked.

from the bittorrent-as-promotion dept

Skateboarder and filmmaker (often focusing his films on skateboarding) Stacy Peralta is releasing his latest skateboarding documentary, Bones Brigade: An Autobiography, about the Bones Brigade skateboarding crew -- Tony Hawk, Lance Mountain, Steve Caballero, Mike McGill and Tommy Guerrero -- which Peralta helped put together in the first place. Rather than go the traditional route with releasing the movie (as he's done many times, including with the acclaimed skateboarding documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys), Peralta has decided to go direct to fans. The movie was shown at Sundance earlier this year, where it got some attention and had a bunch of opportunities to go with traditional distribution partners, but instead Peralta figured it was time to take control, noting that the DIY ethic of direct-to-fan is similar to the way skateboarding evolved in the early days:

As skateboarders, as people that have always lived on the outside, have always had to sneak over fences or through the back door, have always had to create our own terrain, we’ve decided to put that ethic towards how we release “Bones Brigade: An Autobiography.” We turned down all of the conventional offers for distribution when we came out of the festival in favor of doing it ourselves.

One part of this DIY approach is that to promote this new movie, Peralta teamed up with BitTorrent and TopSpin to help with direct-to-fan digital distribution and promotion. Via BitTorrent, people can download a "Bones Brigade Bundle," including a bunch of extras, and then using a TopSpin feature (either on the web, or directly in the uTorrent client), if you submit your email address, you can download an entirely free copy of the classic skate film, The Search for Animal Chin, which was released 25 years ago, and featured the members of the Bones Brigade. So the combined effort, from Animal Chin to the Bones Brigade documentary is sort of a "full circle" situation.

It's great to see more filmmakers really embracing both direct-to-fan, but also realizing that things like BitTorrent aren't automatically bad, but have a place in a marketing campaign as well. In this case, it's interesting to see Peralta using a combination of a few different tools to create an integrated and comprehensive campaign not only to market the new film, but also to distribute the old film (the first time it's officially available in digital format). Oh, and if you'd like to download The Search for Animal Chin, there's an embedded widget right below this sentence...

from the torrent-away dept

We sometimes hear people say that BitTorrent as a technology is only good for infringement. We know that's not true, but then people will point to examples of how frequently it's used for infringement. Of course, that's meaningless when you look at both the larger picture and the nature of trends. When new distribution technologies are introduced, it's not surprising that they're used that way because there's so little legitimate activity on the system. But that changes over time. Remember, when the VCR first came about, nearly all activity on it was described as "infringing" by some, because there was no legitimate content being offered. However, obviously, over time that changed and more and more legitimate content was offered.

And while some ignorant organizations may declare that the Internet Archive is a "rogue site," I think most people recognize that it's a wonderful repository of all sorts of legal content, much of which is now available using the rather efficient distribution technology BitTorrent.

from the pira¢y-is-the-new-paid-content dept

In many people's minds (especially those in certain industries), the word "torrent" is synonymous with piracy. This has obviously caused a bit of problem for BitTorrent, Inc., the parent company of BitTorrent client, uTorrent. Despite the fact that uTorrent has legitimate uses, most members of the press and politicians continue to link BitTorrent with the act of copyright infringement, and in some cases, seem to believe that The Pirate Bay and BitTorrent are either related businesses, if not actually the same entity.

Following the footsteps of Youtube, BitTorrent is experimenting with ways to help artists make money while still giving away their work for free. The first experiment goes live today. Torrentfreak has the details:

The idea is simple. BitTorrent Inc. helps artists to promote a bundle of free content to their 150 million users. This bundle includes a piece of sponsored software such as a media player or anti-virus package that can be installed as an option. When a user installs the free software, both the artist and BitTorrent get a cut of the proceeds.

“We believe we can make digital distribution even more viable for creators and fans. So, beginning now, we’ll be testing new ways to drive profitability for creators while delivering even more meaningful media experiences for our users,” BitTorrent CEO Eric Klinker comments on the announcement.

The first artist featured is DJ Shadow, who's releasing a package of exclusives and some sponsored software. Hidden Transmissions From the MPC Era (1992-1996) will be promoted to existing users with banner and text ads and new users will be given that option when installing uTorrent. Getting DJ Shadow on board with free distribution and torrent services is a bit of coup on BitTorrent's part, considering he's made statements in the past decrying what he perceives to be a continuing devaluation of music by file sharing.

[I]f you’re holding your breath, waiting for me to boost my cool-quotient by giving my music away for free, it’s not going to happen. The fact is that I feel my music has value. You may disagree, and that’s fine. But I know how much energy I put into what I do, and how long it takes me to make something I’m satisfied with. Giving that away just feels wrong to me. It’s not about money per se; I can donate a large sum of money to charity and not think twice, but I won’t give my art away. I’d rather sell it to 100 people who value it as I do than give it away to 1000 who could care less. That’s MY choice.

I point out this statement not to "name and shame" DJ Shadow or as a cheap dig at what could be perceived as a hypocritical act, but rather to show that BitTorrent's experiment would seem to have a chance of succeeding. Given DJ Shadow's stance, it's highly unlikely that he would have signed on to give away his music for free (and linked his name with a service often mentioned in the same breath as "copyright infringement") if he didn't see legitimate potential in the plan.

BitTorrent obviously hopes that showing artists the monetary potential of the uTorrent platform will garner it more recognition as a legitimate platform. Several more campaigns are due to roll out this summer, with BitTorrent closely tracking the response to each experiment.